Tech Olive

So, here we are. Another year, another Call of Duty title in the colossal franchise. This time around, we get an installment that sets itself apart from previous titles. Perhaps only by a small margin, but it’s enough to breathe fresh life into the long-running series. However, is it enough to rekindle the love we felt with the release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare? World at War and MW2 couldn’t do it. What about Black Ops?

Singleplayer

The story is told by the main protagonist, Alex Mason, as he is brutally tortured into speaking about his operations as a covert operative. Unsurprisingly, Black Ops rewrites a bit of history to suit its own agenda and manages to pack in enough explosions and conspiracy theories to make any Hollywood movie writer happy, though not quite to the extreme that we saw in MW2. Still, it’s a solid story that keeps things tense, even if it can be predictable and unnecessarily complicated at times. During the campaign, you’ll find yourself flying stolen choppers through Vietnam, sabotaging Russian missile programs, doing some covert ops in Cuba, and even spending some time bridging the gap between World at War‘s and Black Ops‘ stories.

Changing the CoD formula a bit, the main protagonist actually has a voice, a face, and a name. While not always deep or interesting, the other characters you’ll run into seem very real and believable. This is mostly thanks to the fantastic voice-acting and equally impressive animations.

There is much more focus on a single character’s story throughout the campaign, rather than several different characters as CoD games have done before. This doesn’t actually change a lot of how the story progresses, but it does allow more time for crucial character development. In typical style, Black Ops also features a few vehicle-based missions to break up the firefights and — while it’s well done and original — these vehicle segments fall just short of their mark by feeling a little sloppy and even frustrating at times.

A few little gripes aside, the singleplayer experience is undoubtedly the best CoD campaign since CoD4. In some aspects, one could say better than CoD4, but that’s beside the point. Treyarch’s choice to take the story in a whole new direction really paid off. With Black Ops to show for it, I have no problems with Treyarch taking over as the dominant CoD developer, especially after the Infinity Ward meltdown with MW2. I just hope Treyarch can keep it up and not release Black Ops 2 for their next installment.

Multiplayer

Black Ops offers a new currency system of CoD Points. These points are earned alongside XP, and you spend them to unlock new weapons, attachments and just about anything else used in multiplayer. Unfortunately, the overall implementation of this currency system feels mostly uninspired, with nothing actually special you can spend it on or anything big to save up for.

Offering not only the traditional gametypes and multiplayer features that we’ve all come to know and love, Treyarch included several new gametypes and features, some which were suggested by the Call of Duty community. You can put your riches on the line with “wager matches,” which puts you against other gamers in an intense and unique battle for survival in these new gametypes, such as “Gun Game” and “One in the Chamber,” where each player has one bullet and a knife. Every time you kill an enemy, you steal his bullet. It’s all about surviving while getting the most kills.

And of course, Treyarch brings back the co-op Zombie gameplay that we enjoyed in World at War, but with a bit of a different theme. It’s not all Nazi zombies this time around. It’s a little something more — and it’s definitely still zombies. Just be sure to stick around after the game’s credits once you finish the campaign.

To summarize the multiplayer aspect would be to say that it tried just a little too hard to impress and ultimately fell on its face. All the new content, weapons and other equipment goes a long way to making the game feel different than MW2 in multiplayer, even if it does use mostly the same HUD. However, in its current state, it’s only just playable after the fixes that Treyarch has released. In another few weeks, I’d imagine it’ll be thriving and just as strong as any CoD title before it. Just be prepared to grit your teeth until then.

Thanks to memory leaks, random performance issues, and terrible server-based lag issues, many gamers were greeted by a $60 paperweight for the first few days after release, not to mention difficulty actually playing with your friends and connecting to specific servers, as you can’t add favorites by IP address. Even after the first patch, the game still harbors some ugly bugs that makes you wonder just how much pre-release testing the game was put through. However, give it a few weeks and Treyarch will undoubtedly have it smoothed out. Hopefully they’ll also keep their promise of closely-monitoring and punishing any hacking/exploiting activities.

Scores

- Graphics: 10
With each new installment of the CoD franchise, we see the next step in the evolution of the game’s engine, and Black Ops is no exception. Featuring some great environmental and particle effects along with fantastic character animations, the game even supports up to 16x anti-aliasing — assuming you’ve got a rig that can handle the job, of course.

- Storyline: 8
Though the campaign is certainly the best since CoD4, it ultimately fails to be very memorable and gets a little needlessly complicated at the end. It’s still a very well-crafted story of conspiracy and intrigue set to a nice backdrop of secret and deniable operations, all leading up to an ending that will leave you with a bit of a cliffhanger, but still manages to bring closure for the most part.

- Gameplay: 8
Despite following only a single character for most of the 5-hour campaign, Black Ops still manages to fit in a large range of contrasting missions and locations. Still, it feels like the singleplayer campaign is lacking some good stealth and sniping segments that could have made it that much better. However, it’s all supported by a great music score and very immersing sound direction, including some help from The Rolling Stones.

- Controls: 7
As one would expect, Black Ops employs a very familiar control scheme for any FPS gamer or experienced CoD player. However, some of the controls in vehicle-based missions (there are no drivable vehicles in multiplayer, save for a few killstreak rewards) can feel cumbersome at times, making those entire segments feel very cumbersome as well.

- Lasting Appeal: 10
The multiplayer is the deepest and most detailed we’ve seen from the series to date. The inclusion of dedicated servers only further cements the game’s reliability for PC gamers and brings us out of the stone age that MW2 forced upon us with its terrible server and lobby systems. Add that to the collection of secrets, unlockables and achievements littered throughout the game’s singleplayer and multiplayer modes, and you’ve got some solid value for your money.

Overall Score: 9 Olives

Purchase Call of Duty: Black Ops on Amazon.